Senate cmte passes Unborn pain bill & reporting/consent bill

Possibly emboldened by the events in Wisconsin, five members of the Senate Judiciary committee played hooky on Monday to deny a quorum needed to vote out pro-life bills– but citizen uproar forced them back to the table in the evening.

The bill had passed 91-30 in the House but narrowly escaped major undoing by Sen. Laura Kelly(D-Topeka), under the tutelage of Rep. Barb Bollier (R-Mission Hills); both are fierce abortion supporters. Kelly’s amendment would have changed the term ‘unborn child’ to ‘fetus’, and defined pain-receptivity to 26 weeks gestation “fetuses with a functioning cerebral cortex”!

These folks don’t seem to understand that preemies of 22 weeks gestation in the NICU hospital units have the same pain sensitivity as same-aged babies in the womb. They cry, said Sen.Mary Pilcher-Cook (R-Shawnee), and anyone with eyes can see that the tiny preemies feel pain.

In 2004, arguably the world’s top pain researcher was commissioned by the U. S. Justice Department to explain (in three courts challenges to the federal partial birth abortion ban) when and how unborn babies feel pain. HB 2218 is based on that testimony and HUNDREDS of peer-reviewed scientific articles.